Bethesda devs love switching between The Elder Scrolls and Fallout because going from fantasy to sci-fi "keeps things fresh": "All of these things just get your creativity flowing"

A zoomed-in screenshot of a character in golden armor wielding a sword and shield in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion.
(Image credit: Bethesda)

While Bethesda juggles a lot of pressure these days, between working on both The Elder Scrolls 6 and whatever's happening in Fallout, it's also a creatively nourishing environment, because the devs get to enjoy two distinct flavors of storytelling.

Flipping between the properties is a challenge, but it gives people much-needed breaks, too, as two creatives recently told the PC Gamer magazine.

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"You work on the same thing for long enough, sometimes it can become – not boring – but it can become monotonous," Angela Browder, studio and production director at Bethesda, adds. "The transition, to go from Fallout to Elder Scrolls, and then back to Fallout, and then to Starfield, all of these things just get your creativity flowing."

Having such versatility is a rare thing in the industry, especially at Bethesda’s level. While anticipation is sky high, there's a lot of space for the teams to experiment and throw around ideas, because the next Elder Scrolls and Fallout games have colossal assured install bases.

Of course, it would be nice if we knew more about what's going on in either, but that's a different conversation. Todd Howard's been teasing something to do with the wasteland for some time, and it seems like no amount of bottle caps can get us any more information until the company's good and ready. We'll keep you informed.

Fallout 3 "went hard on the gloomy despair of the post-apocalyptic world" to differentiate it from Oblivion, but one dev thinks Bethesda went too far: "We just drained the color out of the world"

Anthony McGlynn
Contributing Writer

Anthony is an Irish entertainment and games journalist, now based in Glasgow. He previously served as Senior Anime Writer at Dexerto and News Editor at The Digital Fix, on top of providing work for Variety, IGN, Den of Geek, PC Gamer, and many more. Besides Studio Ghibli, horror movies, and The Muppets, he enjoys action-RPGs, heavy metal, and pro-wrestling. He interviewed Animal once, not that he won’t stop going on about it or anything.

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